Female gaze

As a woman as a female creator and as a private person I realised at an early age, that the male gaze is the general point of view itself. I think that it could, and it must be changed.

In making my final project, I sought to construct a series of images in my own autonomous, intuitive visual language to represent the everyday questions of womanhood and women’s existence. During the creative process, I have transformed some of my true stories as well into symbolic motifs by creating staged and controlled images.

My aim was to communicate my own, personally experienced moments in a way that talks about the phenomenon in general instead of being reduced to a subjective point of view. Women’s roles, social expectations, and even the concept of decorum were the subjects of my study but my interests also centered on pairs of opposites such as body image/self image and expected-perfect/ flawed-imperfect.

Thus the final series not only talks about womanhood and femininity, but also reveals my own relation them, just as to photography itself.

Understanding and raising awareness of my own female being as a creator may sound like evidence, but sometimes it is not easy to undress the acquired habits I learned through the years. For example, it can be hard to regard women, as not to put it into an external position (a man’s eye), but from my own situation, sexuality, empathy, experience, etc.

Sometimes I only realise it when I try to be conscious during the shootings. At the same time I have always had this feminine viewpoint in my previous work as well. I am also discussing this topic in my thesis when I am talking about this “schizophrenic” condition, when women get the pressure that we need to define ourselves through the eyes of men.

To me, the anger I feel because of helplessness in some life situations can only be overcome if you do not care about the conventions, and I do my job - if you like it regardless of gender. This, in a life and morality similar to today’s it is almost impossible, so I do it as a woman.